The Seduction of Water (9 page)

I stay another hour and drink three (or is it four?) tumblers full of sour, greenish wine. By the time I walk home my head is spinning. I haven’t even looked properly at the magazines Phoebe slipped into my book bag before I left. I stop at Abingdon Square under a street lamp and pull out a copy of
Caffeine
.

The sight of my name on the cover has the unexpected effect of making me feel lightheaded. Or maybe it’s just the wine. I should be pleased. My name comes first on the list of contributors. The drawing Phoebe’s chosen for the cover even refers to my piece. It’s a pen-and-ink drawing of a naked woman sitting on a rock, her long hair spread out around her like a fisherman’s net. Caught in her hair is a naked man. In the borders of the picture, enclosed in Celtic spirals, swim sinuous seals. It’s the same illustration that’s on the cover of the book Aidan gave me. What an odd choice for the Mother’s Day issue, I think, but then I notice the caption at the bottom of the cover. “Rewriting Our Mother’s Lives: Cutting Loose the Ties That Bind.”

I can scratch the idea of sending this to my aunt Sophie for Mother’s Day. I’ll have to go out tomorrow and buy her a nice cardigan to go with the MOMA address book I’d already gotten her.

By the time I get home the mood of exhilaration I’d felt at the party has evaporated and turned as bitter as the smell of cooked greens that permeates my one-room apartment. I’m replaying every conversation, looking for the missteps like hunting for dropped stitches. How could I have referred to the Crown Hotels as a chain? Or gone on and on about how my father emulated Harry Kron’s management techniques? Although he’d politely told me that he’d be “keeping an eye on me” it was Natalie Baehr he’d singled out and given his card to.

“I’ve been thinking of revamping the logo of the Crown Hotels,” he told an awed and speechless Natalie. “I think I could do something with this extraordinary tiara you’ve created.”

Well good for Natalie, I think, unfolding my futon couch so violently I catch my hand in the wooden slats. I should be glad for her. I should rejoice in my student’s success.

Lying in bed, though, thinking of the odd mix of my students at the show, I kick at the sheets and thrash uneasily. What a mistake! Harry Kron wasn’t the only one to give Natalie Baehr his number. I’d seen Aidan and Natalie exchanging telephone numbers. How was I going to explain to Natalie that Aidan was an ex-con!

I flip over and try to think of something positive from the evening. Some of my Grace students looked like they were having a great time. Mrs. Rivera struck up a conversation with several textile majors about Mayan embroidery. I’d rarely seen her look so carefree. But then I noticed Mr. Nagamora. Only minutes before I left did I realize he had been standing in a corner, smiling and nodding at the groups of people who were, on the whole, ignoring him. I told him again how much I’d loved his telling of “The Crane Wife” and offered to walk with him across town, but then Phoebe came up with those issues of
Caffeine
and when I turned back Mr. Nagamora was gone. I scanned the room for him, but he’d fled as abruptly as the bird in his story, leaving behind the same trail of bloodied feathers.

I close my eyes and moan aloud at the picture waiting for me there—the papier-mâché geese suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, their ruptured bellies disgorging white down.

I get up, walk to my bathroom, and throw up. A sour greenish bile that looks like dirty seawater. Feeling slightly better, I remake my bed and try to sleep. Just as I’m drifting off, though, I hear the question Harry Kron asked that I never got to answer.
Where in the hotel did your mother write?

The answer is that she wrote in every room of the hotel, between the months of October and May when the hotel was closed. She wrote everything in longhand first, usually on hotel stationery—which of course made my aunt Sophie furious because it was so expensive. It wasn’t bad enough that she used the paper, Aunt Sophie used to complain, but she was always stealing it out of the drawers in the guest rooms so that my aunt had to always check and replenish the supply before the hotel reopened. Even when my father ordered her a stack of the same paper she left that stack untouched until it was time to type. She preferred to wander from room to room until she settled on one she wanted to write in. Then she would perch at the desk, slip a sheet of letter paper from the drawer and take out the fountain pen she always kept in her pocket, and she’d write until she’d exhausted that supply of paper in the drawer. Then she would move on, sometimes leaving the thin sheets of handwritten pages behind her or carrying them so carelessly to the next room that some would slip from her grasp and flutter down the long empty halls, the loose white sheets trailing behind her like the feathers of a molting bird.

My father or aunt, or later I, would gather them and return the pages to her, which she would shuffle haphazardly into a pile that slowly grew over the winter like a snowdrift, until sometime near spring she would come to roost in one of the rooms and then, after a period of silence, we’d hear the typing begin: a steady, rhythmic beat that sounded like rain falling on the roof.

It was hard to imagine a finished novel coming out of those haphazard wanderings—and yet two books had. Only after I was born had something gone wrong. The pages had accumulated, the typing had begun, but years went by and no book appeared. It was as if she were weaving on an empty loom.

Sometime in the middle of the night it begins to rain and it’s that sound that finally lulls me to sleep and follows me into my dreams. In my dream I am walking through the halls of the Hotel Equinox, not fleeing the sound, but following it, trying to find its source. As I walk up the main stairs, I run my hands along the walls, feeling for the vibration. At first I feel only a faint tremor, but then the walls begin to shake with the concussive beating and I realize I’m getting closer. The chandelier on the second-floor landing is shaking so hard its crystal drops sing like window chimes. This violent clatter, which shakes the old hotel like an earthquake, is coming from the room at the top of the stairs, the door of which is vibrating on its hinges.

Only when I touch the cut-glass knob do I remember that this is a room I’m not supposed to enter—it’s a suite reserved for very important guests—but it’s too late, the door is swinging open, the awful sound is stilled, leaving an even more awful silence behind it. Something turns to me from the black cage at the window but then there’s a great rush of wind that hits my wide-open eyes and blinds me for a moment. When I can see again the room is empty, only the stir of breeze from the open window a reminder of those wings that have grazed against my damp face.

When I open my eyes it is morning. The window above my bed has come open in the night and the rain has soaked my sheets. The phone is ringing. I answer it and hear a voice that’s more like a croak and for a moment, still half asleep, I think of the giant bird suspended above the old black typewriter. In my dream the bird was pulling feathers from its breast and feeding them into the typewriter’s smooth black roller. Someone on the phone coughs and I switch the receiver to my other ear.

“. . . feder?” I catch only the last bit.

“Yes, this is Iris Greenfeder,” I say.

“This is Hedda Wolfe. I was your mother’s agent. I want to see this memoir you’re writing about Kay.”

Chapter Nine

“The Wolf? Hedda Wolfe, the literary agent?” Jack asks that night. When I called and told him about Hedda Wolfe’s call he said he’d come right over even though it was a Tuesday.

“The same,” I say. “I read an article in
Poets & Writers
that said her workshop is called ‘the wolfshop.’ Some say she devours writers.”

“Or makes them,” Jack says. “I hear she got a six-figure advance for some twenty-year-old’s first story collection.”

I’m surprised that Jack—usually so outwardly disdainful of commercialism in the arts—knows and cares about a six-figure advance. I dip an asparagus spear in the hollandaise sauce I decided to make when Jack showed up at my door with a bundle of pale thin asparagus spears and an armful of lilac boughs. The sauce is lumpy because he’d come up behind me while I was stirring it at the stove and leaned his cool cheek against the back of my neck and folded himself into the curve of my back. This is new, I thought, as I switched the gas off under the saucepan and turned in the circle of his arms like something tightly rolled unfurling. I kept that feeling while we made love, of something wound close uncoiling slowly, but with an urgency I had thought we’d lost a long time ago. We had it once, I remembered when Jack, too impatient to fold out the futon, lifted me onto the wide window seat.

When we’d first met we were both dating other people—he, an art student at Cooper, me, my Medieval Lit professor at City University—but his ardor had totally swept me away. I remembered the first night I brought him back here and we made love standing against this same window ledge, so recklessly that the glass shivered in the panes, and then again, in the bed. And then in the middle of the night I’d woken to find him stroking me. As soon as I opened my eyes he entered me and came, quickly, without waiting for me, without apology. I hadn’t minded, but felt instead awed by his need of me. It never happened like that again. He’s been a courteous, generous lover for these last ten years but I sometimes feel that that third time we made love on our first night was the last time he wanted me more than I wanted him. That some extra edge had dulled then, a slight shift of desire that left me the one always wanting more.

Lover and beloved. Didn’t there always have to be one of each? I’ve felt like the lover for close to ten years now, but tonight I feel a slight shift, something subtle as the fine mist of rain that seeped through the screens and soaked my back at the window, a shift in how his eyes followed me when I went to the stove and finished stirring the hollandaise sauce and steaming the asparagus. A shift in how he watched me put down the plates on the bed as though I were some powerful sorceress and this lemony butter sauce steaming the air around us a spell I’d woven. Even the lilacs, which had been cool and disappointingly odorless when Jack brought them, have opened in the warmth of the apartment, opened in the heat of our lovemaking, and released their heady purple scent—that smell of flowers that bloom briefly and only once—into the air.

It’s only when we’re eating the asparagus and lumpy hollandaise sauce that I wonder how much this change is attributable to my newfound success and I feel compelled to confess my reservations about Hedda Wolfe.

“My mother had a falling-out with her,” I tell him.

“Do you know what it was about?”

“I overheard my mother say to my father, ‘She’d have me give up everything for writing—even my family.’ ”

“What do you think she meant?”

“I think she told my mother not to have me. I imagine she thought that having a child would be bad for her writing career.”

“And she was right.”

I laugh so Jack won’t see how hurt I am by this remark. Also, it is kind of funny. Hedda Wolfe—literary arbiter, maker and breaker of authors—nearly blue-penciling me out of existence thirty-six years ago like an ill-conceived metaphor or a wordy passage.

“Thanks, Jack,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. “In other words you think it would have been better if I hadn’t been born . . .”

“You know I don’t mean that, Iris, but I do think that your mother’s story is about the consequences of giving up your art. It’s a cautionary tale.”

“Well, maybe a cautionary tale against staying in cheap hotels with illicit lovers . . .”

“What drove her there? Do you really think she’d have been in that hotel if she’d kept writing? Would she have had to look elsewhere for satisfaction if she had finished her third book?”

It seems an unlikely explanation, but this is the first time I’ve heard Jack profess a belief in monogamy and marital fidelity as the badge of the fulfilled artist. It’s an appealing thought. Maybe this is what’s kept him at arm’s length from me all these years—a sense that I was incomplete as an artist. Maybe there will be more than a six-figure contract to come out of this book.

“I’d have to do a lot of research,” I tell him. “I hardly know anything about my mother’s early life. I might have to spend some time up at the hotel this summer, especially since it looks like this will be the Hotel Equinox’s last season.”

“It’ll be good for you,” he says stroking my hand and then moving closer to me and touching my face. His hands, I notice, smell like butter and lemons. “I’d like to get out of the city when classes are over.”

“I think my aunt would let us have the attic rooms,” I say, sliding down beside him, pressing into his hands. “The light is good, the views are amazing.”

Jack doesn’t bother to tell me, as he usually does when I mention the famous view from the Hotel Equinox, that he’s not a landscape painter. He’s too immersed in the landscape of my hip, the small of my back, the hollow behind my knee. That slow unfurling I’d felt before becomes a flutter now as if what I’d thought was something green and root-bound had been, all along, the beating of wings against the chrysalis of my flesh.

Walking to Hedda Wolfe’s apartment the next morning I carry with me the memory of the night with Jack like some secret hidden power: X-ray vision or the ability to fly. I’ve become one of my mother’s superheroes, those creatures she wrote about who hid their wings between their shoulder blades and possessed gills pleated between their breasts. I even imagine that I smell lilacs, and then realize that of course I do—the florists and Korean grocers on Washington Street are full of them. Great nodding heads—like dopey, long-eared spaniels—of the purple blooms are at every corner. Where do they come from, I wonder. They’re not a flower that’s grown in a hothouse or nursery. I remember the shaggy bushes that lined the hotel’s drive and bloomed for only a week or two in May. Hardly worth the trouble, my aunt Sophie would say and try to convince Joseph to uproot them and plant something tidier like box hedge or yew trees. But Joseph knew that the lilacs were my mother’s favorite and wrapped their roots each fall to help see them through the cold winter. What would become of them if the hotel was sold and closed? For that matter, what will become of Joseph, who must be close to eighty now.

When I turn on 14th toward the river the scent of lilacs is replaced by something metallic and acrid. I pass a large open stall where a man is hosing down the sidewalk. White shapes hang in the shadows and I quickly look away, toward the river, where the low buildings afford an unusual view of open sky and sunlight. I notice a new café on the corner—modeled after the open-air market cafés of Paris—and the sleek white facade of a new clothing store. I check the address Hedda gave me and hope I haven’t copied it down wrong. Although this part of the meatpacking district has boutiques and restaurants now, I didn’t think it was zoned for residences, and she made it clear on the phone that she was inviting me to her home.

“After all,” she said, “I knew you when you were a baby.”

When I finally locate the number it’s an industrial building, an old warehouse. I ring the buzzer and struggle with the heavy, steel door. I have to ring three times before I’m able to get it open.

The bottom floor is unfinished industrial space—something you don’t see too much of anymore in the city. The ground floor of Jack’s loft looked like this ten years ago, but now it’s a South American furniture store. I notice in the dim recesses of this cavernous space a massive floor scale with an enormous grappling hook hanging above it. An image of the white carcasses I’d seen on the street comes briefly to mind, but of course the space is empty here. Instead of the smell of blood from the street there’s the faintest whiff of coffee beans. To the right a flight of stairs climbs steeply up to a steel door.

I start up the stairs, which are corrugated iron, rusted in spots so that you can see through to the floor below. So far this isn’t at all what I thought the famous Hedda Wolfe’s home would look like. I’d expected something tweedy and book-lined—a town house in Chelsea with flower boxes and first editions in the built-in bookcases.

I knock on the metal door and hear that instantly recognizable voice call “Come.” Like the captain of a ship, I think, turning the knob.

The space I enter is somewhat shiplike. Maybe it’s the enormous floor-to-ceiling half-moon windows that give the impression that you’re standing on the deck of a luxury liner, or the shifting light that undulates along the pale green walls like the reflection of water in an underground cavern—only here the effect comes not from water but from branches moving outside the opaque window. A long low backless couch runs under the windows, a few feet out from the wall, like something you would perch on for a moment to admire the paintings—or in this case, the viewless windows.

On the opposite wall there’s a row of straight-backed metal chairs. I imagine they’re pulled into a circle when she holds her workshop.

At the far end of all this shifting light sits Hedda Wolfe behind a wide desk, an almost empty expanse of some kind of green-black stone beneath another half-moon window, this one glazed with clear glass instead of frosted. Only when I step forward does she stand and come out from behind the desk to greet me. I have a feeling she’s used to guests pausing, disoriented, on her threshold.

I walk across the wide-planked floor, my hand out to shake hers, but remember, only when she lifts both her hands and lightly touches my arms just above the elbows with her fingertips, that I once heard that Hedda Wolfe has severe arthritis—so severe she can’t shake hands. Deprived of the conventional greeting I stand still as she studies me with her large, slightly hooded gray eyes.

If I hadn’t heard her voice, I’d doubt this was the woman I spoke to on the phone. I’m not sure what I’ve been expecting. Talons, perhaps? Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
? Certainly not this slight, elegant woman with chin-length silver hair, pale violet silk dress, and ladylike pearls at her throat and earlobes.

“Yes,” she says, her soft, crumpled hands fluttering down from my arms. “I can see Kay in you, and Ben too. I was sorry,” she says, still holding my gaze, “to hear about your father last year. I wrote to Sophie and asked her to convey my sympathies to you. But perhaps . . . well, at any rate, I am sorry. He was a fine man, your father. A prince.”

She holds my gaze another moment, long enough to see my eyes well up, and then gestures for me to be seated in one of the two armchairs in front of the desk while she takes the other one.

“So tell me about this book. What made you decide to write it? Why now?”

“I’m not sure,” I tell her honestly. “I started thinking about that story my mother used to tell me—the selkie story—and I used it for an assignment with my classes. I was surprised at how powerfully my students reacted to the idea of retelling the fairy tales they’d heard as children . . .” I pause for a moment, thinking of Gretchen Lu’s maimed hands, and realize I’m staring at Hedda’s hands, which lie, palms up, in her lap, curled in on themselves like a piece of knitting that’s been stitched too tightly. I quickly look up into Hedda’s face, surprising a look of impatience in her eyes.

“So it’s not that you’ve found any new material? Letters . . . or a manuscript?” She leans toward me, her hands stirring in her lap as if grasping at something, but I remind myself that it’s only her arthritis that make them seem like a witch’s claws. I can see, though, why people are afraid of her. It occurs to me that she’s the last person I’d like to have read anything I’d written. That sudden conviction gives me the nerve to be honest.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I even want to write about my mother. Or that I can write about her. I don’t know that much about her. She never talked about her childhood, or family, or anything that happened to her before the day she showed up at the Hotel Equinox with her one suitcase . . .”

“No,” Hedda says, leaning back, the expression on her face softening. “Kay would never talk about her life before she came to the hotel. Not to anyone.”

I shrug. “Maybe there wasn’t much to tell. Maybe she had a boring life and that’s why she created a fantasy world. Tirra Glynn. A magical land populated by changelings and shape-shifters.”

“Exactly.” Hedda Wolfe leans forward again in her chair, her eyes gleaming with interest. It’s almost thrilling to feel that intelligence trained on me and I imagine this must be the flip side to her harshness—to excite her approbation must feel like having the sun shine on you. She lifts her hands from her lap and tries to interlace her fingers, but they splay limply on the folds of her silk dress.

“Exactly what?” I whisper, more than a little horrified and ashamed. Those hands. It strikes me how awful it is that this woman who has spent her life nurturing writers probably can’t even hold a pen.

“Changelings. Shape-shifters. I think Kay left behind a life when she arrived at the Hotel Equinox. It’s as if she sprang into existence there: twenty-five years old on a summer day in 1949. She made herself up like one of her own characters. But whatever she was fleeing from kept coming up in her books. That’s why she didn’t want the second one published.”

“She didn’t want the second one published?” I repeat stupidly. The idea of anyone not wanting their book published is so foreign to me I know I must be gaping openmouthed.